Hazleton Housewife Is Said To Carry Stigmata She Appears To Bleed From Her Forehead As Christ Did. Suzanne Cassidy Newhouse News Service

January 02, 1997|The Morning Call

Mary Ellen Lukas wears the workaday uniform of a homemaker and mom on this autumn day: jeans and a baggy top.

Sitting in her pastor's office at Most Precious Blood Roman Catholic Church, she has only a little time to talk before she has to rush to pick up a daughter from school.

She seems strikingly ordinary. Her ordinariness vanishes when she begins to expound --somewhat reservedly at first, then with increasing passion -- about the need for Catholics to return to the rudiments of their faith, to observe the Blessed Sacraments and to honor Jesus Christ.

In her ardor, she lifts a hand, as a preacher might. And, as she speaks, a bright red trickle falls from beneath her pale blond bangs.

She does not seem to notice, but her pastor and spiritual director, the Rev. Maurice Raymond, rises matter-of-factly from his desk to get her a tissue. She takes it, offering an almost absent-minded smile of thanks. She dabs at her forehead, then continues to speak intensely about what Christ wants from his followers.

The tissue now is stained with red; there is a track of what appears to be blood on Lukas' forehead.

Minutes later, more crimson drops appear on her forehead.

The 42-year-old Hazleton mother and housewife is believed by many to exhibit the stigmata: wounds on her palms, feet and side that match those suffered by the crucified Christ. She also appears to bleed from her forehead in a pattern resembling that left by the crown of thorns that Jesus wore.

She is said to bleed during the Catholic Mass and on Good Fridays, and when she speaks of the Eucharist.

She refuses to be photographed, and those close to her say she has tried to keep a low media profile. Knowledge about her seems mostly to have spread by word of mouth.

The story of Mary Ellen Lukas seems bizarre, medieval and unbelievable. Skeptics insist that even if she does bleed, there must be a rational, scientific explanation.

Church officials, generally cautious about reports of mystical phenomena, certainly are not declaring what is happening to Lukas a miracle.

But they have permitted her to speak at parishes and religious institutions, including Mount Saint Mary Seminary and College in Emmitsburg, Md. And her bishop, the Most Rev. James C. Timlin of Scranton has approved for publication two of her writings, including one booklet aimed at priests and nuns.

For years, Lukas has been traveling in relative obscurity around the United States and to heavily Catholic countries, such as Ireland and the Philippines, to talk about the message she believes God wants her to deliver.

She has her own lay ministry, called Our Father's Work, and a growing following of lay people, many of them traditional Catholics who warm to her call to return to the basics of the faith. Scores of priests have participated in her church-sanctioned healing services.

In winning over so many clergy, she no doubt has been helped by two things: Her theology is markedly orthodox, and she continually stresses the importance of priests.

Directed by her bishop to avoid talking publicly about the specifics of what she describes as her intimate relationship with God, Lukas does not say when her wounds first manifested themselves. Raymond says she had been receiving divine messages for some time before the marks appeared.

Though witnesses have seen her bleed profusely in public, Lukas shies from discussing her physical condition. She wears fingerless black gloves that cover the base of her palms.

"I never talk about what he has done with me," Lukas says.

Visionaries and mystical signs are not important, she says. What is paramount is God's message, she says.

"The focus has to be turned back to the sacraments. We're looking at a people whose faith needs to be strengthened," she says. "To focus on these other things and not what Jesus gave us already is not helping the faith."

Lukas is a mother of three daughters, one of them a toddler. Her husband, David, runs an eyeglass business.

Hazleton, where she resides, is a former coal town that remains markedly Catholic. Its streets are dotted with ethnic Catholic churches -- Italian, Polish, Slovak, Lithuanian, German, even Tyrolean.

Lukas says she tries to keep her family life and her work separate.

"In the beginning," she admits, "I wondered all the time why things would happen. Why do I have this work?"

She long ago decided, she says, that while she could not speak as a theologian, she could speak as a mother and housewife. Raised as a Byzantine Catholic, she has only a high school diploma, Raymond says.

Raymond says Lukas started receiving messages from God some years ago. She does not mention the form those messages take. Raymond says she writes everything down and he reads it.

Indeed, he says, what persuaded him six years ago to agree to act as Lukas' spiritual director was the content of her writings. They were in complete accord with Catholic teaching, he says.